"The misconception of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. It was well enough known to be mentioned in "The Marching Morons", a 1951 short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1953 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.[8][9] Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.[10] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact forced off the cliff by the camera crew.[11][12] Because of the limited number of lemmings at their disposal, which in any case were the wrong sub-species, the migration scenes were simulated using tight camera angles and a large, snow-covered turntable.[7] Lemmings also appear in Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story "The Possessed", where their suicidal urges are attributed to the lingering consciousness of an alien group mind which had inhabited the species in the prehistoric past.[13]
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